Redemption's Enigma
by marapozsa
Summary: A timeline is never a straightforward thing.


**Redemption's Enigma**

a k a n t **h a e** - h i _m e_

**Authoress' Note & Disclaimer:** Meh. There's not much to commemorate, except that this two-part one-shot is dedicated and inspired by the tenth segment of Touch of Gray's Angel Feathers. The tenth segment is the little italicized tidbit at the beginning of this. Please note that romance isn't quite so much the focus of this and that if you don't like this it's fine. I'm trying to work my way around writer's block and get in the mood to write The Pawn's Parade for Meii: my wonderfully insistive, deliberate, and intelligent (most of the time) beta. Applause should now be ringing through the stadium for Meii and Touch of Gray. They're both wonderful writers, although Meii won't let me say she's better...

(She is. And she's probably reading this right now, getting ready to turn around, jut her chin out, glare and say, "Hey! Liar!"

(...For sure.)

-

_**xxx. segment ten of angel feathers, by touch of gray**_

"Though Balthier will never, ever admit it, there was something redemptive about the Judge's mask - behind it, he was anonymous. He was just a man who could say or do anything, and it was somehow disconnected with Ffamran Bunansa. A man in a mask was not really human, and so he was free to be a chunk of metal or a cruel hand of the law. He could lay down judgement on the people he hated, and they would never have to know that it was he who did it.

The day he decided to run away was the day he had to condemn a young man who had stolen from someone else, and the condemned looked up and said, voice dripping with acid - _you're no different than the rest of them._

And suddenly, being able to hide wasn't enough."

_-_

_**i. strike**_

He raises a fist. It's one made of literal iron, gilded with intricate designs showing with what prestige he should carry himself for his rank. An iron fist, amusingly hiding what was only a not-so-iron heart. The heart and the hand are both heavy. They both weigh much on the turning point Ffamran is setting out for himself now. This is where he will either become someone of merciful fervor or ruthless political endeavor.

Instead of waving the Dalmascan away like scum that's not worthy of death, he pounds his decisive gavel. It feels heavier each time he raises it. Raises the burden. Raises the price of freedom for himself and another, a price that was already too high to be paid in less than a million lifetimes. This is the first of that million.

When he stops and metes out the final Judgement he can - gold weighs more than love does in his pockets, though not in his soul - the man's clenched and cuffed hands twist open to reveal something glimmering in his palm. Gold, red and blue. The essence of beauty and the foundation of the color spectrum.

(Vaan raises his head, regrets his arrival in Archades in the midst of war with his wayward brother and the rest of the army squadron, and says to the Judge balefully, to try with the last of his willpower to strike fear into someone's heart, "You're no different from the rest of them.")

The day he condemns a man who challenges the reins of history to die, the Bunansa boy would rather not admit that it was someone he might have one day loved...Someone in a far-away future where Father Time diverges and merges and becomes so entwines within macabre versions of it - no, himself - that it - he - can no longer tell the sky from the earth.

Time is immaterial, Ffamran argues later on, with a father who doesn't like being proud of his charismatic son. _Time does not exist_, he'd also like to say.

The theory soothes the aching sore Death leaves behind for him to wallow in; because if time doesn't exist nothing that soils time's grasp (per say, himself) with grand mockeries of reality exists either. What he does is what he does not do.

What he wishes he had done is something he will never do. It's devastating either way.

-

_**ii. kill**_

Five years later, in a place where towers challenge stormy skies and destiny's weave is disrupted by one of the weavers, a man that goes by the name of Balthier stands on the edge of a flight of steps. He stops and looks out a glassless window. The arch bars his field of vision as he raises a hand, crinkles a brow swept by sweat, and whispers, "I condemn you to oblivion."

His finger points to a bird, an angel-bird, his angel-bird. He wants to capture it in a bell jar, name it something frivolous, and watch it die a slow death in a clear prison...So close to freedom in a place where freedom is merely another set of barriers outside the glass smudged with Balthier Bunansa's incriminating fingerprints.

(Another scientific discovery, one supposedly worth lives to make. Does the man really want to will himself to make the sacrifice?)

Like magick, however, the bird dies. Plumage glittering the same color the sky boasts falls from its breast; it plummets to the ground. The feeling the bird's namesake gets when he reads the words fading from his lover's lips is the same. He dies, too, later on when Balthier can't save him anymore than he can save the people he condemned...once upon a time.


End file.
